Manchester: The Meeting Of Minds

13th December 2017

Categories: Latest News

Jonathan Schofield

From developing political philosophies to pushing the world forward scientifically Manchester has often been a place for the meeting of great minds. Art and culture have been involved too. Here’s a trail through the city centre from the northern end to the university side highlighting ten instances of people dreaming dreams. It’s quite long so you might want to break it into two legs.

Start at Chetham’s Library close to Victoria Station. In the 1840s, in The Reading Room at Chetham’s, two German gentlemen would meet who sought to change the world. This was one of many rendezvous places they had in the city but it’s the only one to survive.

Friedrich Engels, Mary Burns and Karl Marx

Two Germans, the twin fathers of Communism, met frequently in Manchester. Engels lived for more than 22 years in the city working at his father’s factory, writing, thinking and subsidising Karl Marx in London through his wages. As Asa Briggs, the historian, wrote: ‘All roads led to Manchester in the 1840s. If Engels had lived not in Manchester his conception of ‘class’ and his theories of the role of class in history might have been very different. The fact that Manchester was taken to be the symbol of the age was of central political importance in modern world history.’ Much of Engels’ book ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ was based on his Manchester experience. Marx would visit Engels for weeks at a time. They would visit clubs and pubs and enjoy each other’s company. Crucial to Engels’ experience in Manchester in the early years was the relationship with his partner Mary Burns, a spirited Irish woman, who was his passport around many of the working class areas this middle-class German would have otherwise found it hard to access. A statue of Engels was brought to Manchester from Ukraine as part of Manchester International Festival in 2017.

Walk south down Long Millgate and Cathedral Street, cross Exchange Square into New Cathedral Street, cross Market Street to St Ann’s Square. Close to St Ann’s Church is a statue of Richard Cobden.

Richard Cobden and John Bright

In a partnership just as close and enduring as that of Marx and Engels, Sussex-born Richard Cobden and Rochdale-born John Bright, shaped a new political and economic theory. This has been called the Manchester School, but is better known as the Free Trade Movement. It was born out of the Anti-Corn Law League, the headquarters of which was demolished to make way for an extension to the nearby Royal Exchange. To Cobden and Bright: ‘(With free trade) the motive for large and mighty empires, for gigantic armies and great navies, for those materials that are used for the destruction of rewards of labour, will die away’. In other words remove government interference in the economy, let business and trade look after itself and free enterprise will flourish. Thus by encouraging entrepreneurship and rewarding hard work everyone will benefit. Often seen as selfish credo its creators believed it was the fair and just basis for human relations. Both men were anti-war and for progress, and were prepared to lose their parliamentary seats by opposing the Crimean War. Cobden  said: ‘At all events arbitration is more just, rational and humane than resort to the sword’. It is fascinating and strange that the fathers of two globally important but utterly oppositional ideas never met in the city even though they spent years in the same place together. A discussion between Marx and Engels and Cobden and Bright, would have been fascinating to witness.

Turn left at St Ann’s Church and walk to Cross Street. The modern office block directly over the road contains on its ground floor a Unitarian Chapel, the third on the site.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens

For many years William Gaskell was the minister of Cross Street Chapel. His worshipped here with his wife who was one of the country's great nineteenth century novelists. This was Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth, who loved a party, hosted a roll call of nineteenth century luminaries including Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Ruskin, Charles Halle and Elizabeth's good friend, Charlotte Brontë. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the biography of Charlotte Bronte in her recently restored house on Plymouth Grove after the latter's death in 1855. The Gaskells were reformists and believed in equal education for girls and boys, equality of opportunity for all classes of people and religious tolerance; essentially all the rights and values progressive twenty first century folk embrace. Charles Dickens visited the Gaskells several times, he had similarly progressive views. Hi sister Fanny lived not so far away, in the Manchester suburb of Ardwick with her husband Henry Burnett, who were both musicians and music teachers. It was during one such visit that Dickens delivered an important and influential speech at Manchester’s Athenaeum on the value of education for all.

Facing Cross Street Chapel turn right and walk into Albert Square which is dominated by Manchester Town Hall. On the second and third floor of Manchester Town Hall, above the Princess Street corner, is the former Mayor’s (now Lord Mayor’s) Apartment.

Ulysses S Grant and Abel Heywood

Manchester Town Hall opened early to receive its first important visitor. The official opening was set for September 1877, but the Mayor, Abel Heywood, made insisted the Lord Mayor’s Apartment was ready for May. Thus, the 18th President of the USA and the man who’d largely won the American Civil War for Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, was the first sleep over visitor in the opulent guest rooms. Manchester had forged a close link to the Union side in the Civil War and was given a statue of Abraham Lincoln to mark this. Grant said at a speech in the Town Hall: “There has been on the part of my countrymen a feeling of friendship towards the people of Manchester, distinct and separate from that which they feel for all the rest of England." His host, Abel Heywood, was one of the great Britons of the period. The word 'polymath' just about does him justice: printer, publisher, guidebook writer, politician, and in his early years, protester. It was Heywood who had led the campaign to build the present Town Hall and is commemorated by the name of the hour bell, Great Abel – a good name for a bell. It is curious to think what subjects these great men from two countries talked over in the quiet of the Town Hall apartment.

Take Mount Street out of Albert Square, walk past the round Central Library and over Peter Street to the huge red/brown bulk of the Midland Hotel.

Sir Frederick Henry Royce and Sir Charles Rolls

Huntingdon-born Royce was a career engineer and after first producing electrical components in his Manchester factory at Cooke Street Hulme, he turned to cars, believing he could improve the current designs. He crafted a limited number of high quaility vehicles and eventually came to the notice of Charles Rolls, an aristocrat of Welsh ancestry and a motor enthusiast. They met in the Midland Hotel in Manchester on 4 December 1904 and agreed to work together with Royce as the manufacturer and Rolls as the salesman/marketeer. Royce was an absolute workaholic. His workforce was on a rota to bring him his meals, although he still often forgot to eat which led to ill-health. Meanwhile Rolls soon lost interest in cars and by 1909 was a non-executive director. He Motor enthusiasm had turned to aeroplane enthusiasm and he became the second Briton to achieve powered flight in planes. Early planes were unreliable and dangerous, thus Rolls also became the first British victim of flying, killed in 1910 at the age of  32. Royce meanwhile would go on to design, not just cars, but aeroplane engines too. There is terracotta memorial to the meeting of Rolls and Royce under the double-arched entrance to the Midland Hotel.

Facing the Midland Hotel, turn right, and walk down Peter Street, on the same side as the Midland Hotel, to the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotel, the former Free Trade Hall.

Emmeline Pankhurst and Winston Churchill

Pankhurst and Churchill might not have met on 13 October 1905 in the Free Trade Hall but they were in the same room. This was the date when the Women’s Social and Political Union (aka The Suffragettes) raised the Votes for Women banner during a Liberal Party meeting. Their leader Emmeline Pankhurst described the occasion: ‘We made a banner with the words ‘Will the Liberal Party Give Votes for Women’. We were to let this down over the gallery rail (but) it was impossible to get the seats we wanted. We cut out and made a small banner with the three-word inscription, ‘Votes for Women’. Thus accidentally, came into existence the slogan of the suffrage movement.’ Two women were arrested after the event, Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter, Christabel, and Annie Kenney, as their frustration boiled over at being prevented from addressing the platform. Both ended up in prison. Winston Churchill was present at the meeting and keen to be elected as one of the MPs for Manchester at the 1906 General Election. He sent a representative along to Strangeways Prison where the women were being held  and offered to pay their fines and have them released.  They refused, as the whole point was to make the news and raise awareness of the cause. Either way Churchill was duly elected as an MP for Manchester. Women wouldn’t get the vote until 1918, but only with an age qualification, full parity with men wasn’t achieved until 1928. 

Retrace your steps to the Midland Hotel and continue straight on. Peter Street becomes Oxford Street and then Oxford Road. Continue under the Mancunian Way elevated motorway to the little gardens on the right called All Saints. This is a fairly long walk but contains spectacular commercial architecture often converted to modern uses. At the far side of gardens is a building with columns. This is now part of Manchester Metropolitan University but was formerly Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall.

Kwane Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta

In October 1945, the future leaders of Ghana and Kenya met in Manchester at Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall. Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta were attending the Fifth Pan-African Congress alongside many others. This was the most important of these congresses and would lead, a year later, to Nkrumah and Kenyatta setting up the Pan-African Federation. One of the resolutions in Manchester affirmed, ‘the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny.’ After the trials of WWII it was felt colonialism had had its day, thus the Manchester congress became the first coordinated step to independence in Africa and the West Indies. As Kenyatta would later say, it was ‘a landmark in the…struggle for unity and freedom’. But why Manchester? A chief local sponsor of the event, Ras Makonnen, said, not long after the Congress: ‘Manchester had become a point of contact with the coloured proletariat in Britain and we had made a name for ourselves in fighting various areas of discrimination in Britain … You could say that we coloured people had a right there because of the age-old connections between cotton, slavery and the building up of cities in England … Manchester gave us an important opportunity to express and expose the contradictions, the fallacies and the pretensions that were at the very centre of the empire.’

Immediately to the right of the former Town Hall is Manchester School of Art.

Adolphe Valette, Gabriela de Bolivar and LS Lowry

Adolphe Valette was born in St Etienne in France and came to Manchester as a commercial artist. He attended Manchester School of Art where his talent was quickly recognised and in 1906 he was invited on to the teaching staff. He pioneered a more direct method of tuition. He was thought of fondly but this did not prevent him being nicknamed ‘Monsieur Repent’, a play on his accent and his frequent request to ‘repaint’. He married a Venezuelan student, Gabriela de Bolivar. They had a son, Pierre, but Gabriela died in 1917 and, while still in Manchester, Valette, married a fellow national, Andree Pallez. Valette taught local lad, Laurence Stephen Lowry, particularly to paint the world around him. Valette was an Impressionist and his paintings of the city between 1908 and 1913 are his masterpieces. In the chemically enriched atmosphere of the industrial city Valette saw beauty and in his best works almost dissolved the buildings, creating an unreal city of atmospherics. It was Valette who inspired Lowry into capturing images of industry and city scenes rather than running to the countryside to paint as with so many contemporaries.

Continue south down Oxford Road. At the junction of Booth Street look left to the large black modern building. This is the National Graphene Institute.

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov

Both these professors were born in Russia, although now both are British citizens and both are knights of the realm, sporting ‘sir’ before their names. In 2010 the pair won the Nobel Prize in Physics, for ‘groundbreaking experiments regarding the material graphene.’ Novoselov was the youngest Nobel laureate in physics since 1973, the year before he was born. To get technical graphene ‘is an allotrope of carbon consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in an hexagonal lattice’. It also happens to be the strongest material ever tested and conducts heat and electricity.Graphene had been the stuff of scientific legend for years but it was in Manchester in 2014 where it was isolated and identified by Geim and Novoselov. Discoveries such as this lead to economic benefits locally. The National Graphene Institute is now up and running housed in a purpose built facility off Oxford Road which also sits on the site of the Albert Club which Friedrich Engels help set up and which hosted Karl Marx. The new building provides facilities for industry and university academics to collaborate on graphene applications and the commercialisation of the material. The creation of building and institute came to over £60m. Both Geim and Novoselov remain at the University of Manchester, the former as Research Professor at the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology, and the latter as a professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Again continue south down Oxford Street. After passing part of Manchester Museum, turn right under the arch into Coupland Street and walk to the brick building ahead and on the right.

Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger, Lawrence Bragg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Niels Bohr

So a New Zealander, a German, an Australian, an Austrian and a Dane walk into a pub. Or rather a university. The greatest boy band of physicists ever assembled came together in Manchester in the early twentieth century. Rutherford, the New Zealander, would be described by Albert Einstein, as ‘a second Newton’ and was the leader of the band. His co-players included the German, Hans Geiger, who would go on to invent the radiation counter, the Australian, Lawrence Bragg, who won the 1915 Nobel Prize for his work on X-ray crystallography, the Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the analytic philosopher, and the Dane, Niels Bohr, another true scientific great and the father of Quantum Physics.  It was the study of the atom that made them notable. In a series of experiments conducted in this building on Coupland Street where Rutherford, with the group, determined ‘the mass of an atom was concentrated in its nucleus - a particle 1,000 times smaller than the atom itself - with the rest being made of a cloud of orbiting electrons’. As one history says ‘it was a discovery that changed the face of science’ putting ‘Rutherford on the verge of 'splitting the atom'.’